An introductory survey of white-collar crime - why it happens, the statutes that reach it, and what that implies for how you document decisions.
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Colonel John Hughes-Wilson's case studies — Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Tet, Yom Kippur, the Falklands — argue that intelligence rarely fails at collection. It fails at dissemination, reception and institutional incentive.
“Never Split the Difference” offers an inside look into the world of high-stakes hostage negotiations, translated into tactics for personal and business use. Chris Voss, a former FBI negotiator, shares strategies that center around empathy, active listening, and tactical mirroring to sway outcomes. This book is an essential guide for anyone aiming to improve their negotiation skills and interpersonal effectiveness.
Fraud is often reported to rise in a downturn. Pressure goes up, headcount comes down, and controls that quietly depended on someone having spare time stop working. This weekend read sets out where exposure concentrates during a downturn and which defenses actually hold: strong internal controls, systems that flag the patterns people miss, a crisis plan written before it is needed, and a culture in which raising an anomaly is not a career risk.
Joel Brenner, a former NSA inspector general and head of US counterintelligence, argues in “Glass Houses” that cyber exposure is structural rather than a failure of controls: the networks that carry commercial, governmental and personal life were built for reachability, not confidentiality.
Counterparty risk is the exposure you take on from the people you transact with — their solvency, their conduct, and their own counterparties. It rarely announces itself, and it is usually priced at zero until it is not. This guide sets out what counterparty risk actually covers, where it hides in ordinary commercial relationships, and how to assess it without stalling the deal.
Intelligence work is usually written about either as thriller or as scandal. Henry A. Crumpton, a veteran officer of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, wrote neither. “The Art of Intelligence” is a practitioner’s account of how sources are recruited and run, how decisions get made on partial information, and how often the hard part is not collecting what matters but persuading anyone to act on it.
In “Beware of deal-killers: Six common due-diligence pitfalls”, published on Canadian Family Offices, Tobias Jaeger of Falcone International names the six places family offices most often lose money: the management team, co-investors, regulatory change, third-party vendors, the deal structure itself, and cultural and language gaps. Each one is straightforward to check and routinely skipped, usually because the deal is already moving.
ESG has moved from a reporting exercise to a due diligence question: investors, lenders, and acquirers now price environmental, social, and governance failures much as they price financial ones. That shifts the burden onto verification — whether the claims in the report survive being checked. This piece covers what ESG risk looks like in practice, and where the gap between stated policy and actual conduct tends to open.
This month, we are delighted to feature “How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence” by David Omand as our Book of the Month. A fascinating exploration of the world of intelligence analysis, this book offers valuable insights for anyone interested in understanding the thought processes of spies and how their techniques can be applied in everyday life.
FIRAv2 is Falcone International’s online risk assessment for business leaders who want to identify and measure their own exposure before someone else does. This guide covers how to work through it, how to read the score that comes back, and how to turn the result into something your team can act on rather than a document that gets filed.
Most business planning treats politics as background noise until a border closes, a currency is restricted, a sanctions list expands, or a local partner turns out to be politically exposed. Geopolitics rarely appears on a risk register, and it is one of the few risks that can invalidate an entire market entry at once. This piece covers how political change reaches the balance sheet, and what to watch for.
As the world becomes increasingly connected, midsize businesses face new and complex security threats. Cybercriminals are always looking for new targets. Companies that aren’t prepared for these threats are at a high risk of losing sensitive data, suffering financial losses, and damaging their reputation. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most significant threats midsize businesses face and what they can do to protect themselves.
In this white paper, we share practical strategies for private equity firms to mitigate deal execution risk, enhance governance, and protect funds and managers against internal and external threats. A high concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of people puts private equity firms under the same pressure as larger investment organizations with a higher headcount.